Just minutes later, I received an e-mail from the head of an elementary school who took another point of view. “When we were growing up,” he wrote, “Most of us had a lot of time on our own that we as children filled on our own. I am wondering if one of the reasons that kids spend a great deal of time instant messaging and making websites on MySpace is to create a sense of privacy or a world apart from their parents. We tend to know what the negatives of instant messaging and personal websites might be, but what might the positives be? Maybe we are missing something that we need to keep in mind. Do they need privacy from their parents and, if so, why do they?”
My answer was simple: yes, children do need privacy. How do you know who you are and what you can do really do unless you actually have a chance to be on your own? The most treasured memories of my childhood are walking around the streets of New York City accompanied by my friends, with that precious ticket to freedom—the bus pass—in my pocket.
Other sweet memories were from July and August, when I spent hours away from my parents near a lake in southern Massachusetts accompanied by friends and cousins. We played for hours; we built forts and fought imaginary enemies. Did we do some bad things? Sure, I guess so. My friends and I blew up some bullfrogs with firecrackers. We tried smoking cigarettes; we made some illicit campfires. We even talked some girls into playing “doctor.” All of this before I was 11 years old.
Would my parents have been upset if they had known what we were doing? Without a doubt. Did we take some risks? Certainly. I don’t know whether I’d be better or worse off had I taken less risks as a child, but I do know that I cannot imagine my childhood without those times. I cannot conceive of my adult personality without those memories.
Kids today spend almost no time “in the woods,” and their moments spent away from their parents’ watchful gaze are precious and few. In our middle and upper-middle-class neighborhoods, children are largely indoors, taking lessons doing homework and getting ready to go to town sports. They are endlessly supervised and monitored. How many parents today are willing to do what our parents did: shovel us out the door at noon, saying “Don’t come back until 6 o’clock?”
We cannot bear the anxiety of not knowing everything about our children’s whereabouts in the physical world. So our children wander off into cyberspace, killing zombies, talking to strangers and visiting all kinds of Web sites, weird and stupid and sexy. And they know we don’t have the time, attention or expertise to follow them there. The Internet is often the only private place for a child today.
That isn’t to say that parents and administrators should turn a blind eye their children’s online activities, they shouldn’t. To the middle-school principal, I suggested he ask his computer teacher to go online and check out the MySpace pages of all of his students. After all, a middle-school director in Maryland I worked with found that two of his girls had posted photos of themselves in their underwear, and their parents knew nothing about it. We need to be vigilant.
But I’m always torn when people call me for wise counsel about kids and privacy, because roaming around in my head there is still a child who treasures his private adventures. My inner boy is certainly going to shout, “Let them be! Let them take some risks.” The parent in me is going to worry and advise, “Check their Web sites. There are dangers out there. There are pedophiles on the Internet.” And what about the psychologist in me?
I hope my inner psychologist has the courage to remember his own boyhood and to keep reminding parents of how precious a bit of privacy was to them when they were growing up.
